Show Highlights

"Theatre gives you the chance to stop the flow of time", says noted director Peter Sellars, talking at the Stratford Festival, about the world according to Shakespeare. It's a giant web of the imagination, woven together for us. ...

Ideas about fire, domesticated and wild, past and present, bringer of life and death and life again. Exceedingly rare in some places and times, fire appears in the mind as a deity: the blazing Shiva, the glowing Vesta, the burning bush. Every living creature depends on fire. And though fire spread civilization through the world, combustion now seems to signal... ruin.

Story Date

Cultural historian Camille Paglia explores some of Shakespeare's hard-to-like women characters, from King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. A grand tour through ideas about art, education and myth -- and how art teaches us how to live.

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Cultural historian Camille Paglia explores some of Shakespeare's hard-to-like women characters, from King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. A grand tour through ideas about art, education and myth -- and how art teaches us how to live. More
Jul 31, 8:46 AM ET

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Cultural historian Camille Paglia explores some of Shakespeare's hard-to-like women characters, from King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. A grand tour through ideas about art, education and myth -- and how art teaches us how to live.

Past Episodes

"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." So wrote German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in a book called Political Theology. In his book Political Theology: Four New Chapters, American legal theorist Paul Kahn argues that the foundations of the American state remain theological. He explores this theme with David Cayley.

In the fourth part of IDEAS' ongoing commemoration of the War of 1812, host Paul Kennedy visits the battlefields at Washington (where the White House was famously torched) and Baltimore (which ultimately inspired the American national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner)....

Ideas about fire, domesticated and wild, past and present, bringer of life and death and life again. Exceedingly rare in some places and times, fire appears in the mind as a deity: the blazing Shiva, the glowing Vesta, the burning bush. Every living creature depends on fire. And though fire spread civilization through the world, combustion now seems to signal... ruin.

Ideas about fire, domesticated and wild, past and present, bringer of life and death and life again. Exceedingly rare in some places and times, fire appears in the mind as a deity: the blazing Shiva, the glowing Vesta, the burning bush. Every living creature depends on fire. And though fire spread civilization through the world, combustion now seems to signal... ruin.

"The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen..." Director Peter Sellars turned A Midsummer Night's Dream on its head at the Stratford Festival. For him, the play is not so much a comedy, as a vision that speaks to the depths of human experience: how we love, what we need, and how we come...

The Fundamentals was a series of books, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, which tried to set the basics of Christianity in stone. Fundamentalism now refers to any back-to-basics movement. Malise Ruthven's Fundamentalism asks what all these movements have in common, in this feature interview with David Cayley....